No connection to either company, but for what it’s worth I’d never in a million years consider Windmill and this product to be direct competitors.
We’ve had a lot of pain with celery and Redis over the years and Hatchet seems to be a pretty compelling alternative. I’d want to see the codebase stabilize a bit before seriously considering it though. And frankly I don’t see a viable path to real commercialization for them so I’d only consider it if everything you needed really was MIT licensed.
Windmill is super interesting but I view it as the next evolution of something like Zapier. Having a large corpus of templates and integrations is the power of that type of product. I understand that under the hood it is a similar paradigm, but the market positioning is rightfully night and day. And I also do see a path to real commercialization of the Windmill product because of the above.
Windmill is used by large enterprises to run critical jobs that require a predefined amount of resources and can run for months if needed, stream their logs, written in code at scale with upmost reliability, throughput and lowest overhead. The only insight from Zapier is how easy it is to develop new workflows.
I understand our positioning is not clear on our landing (and we are working on it), but my read of hatched is that what they put forward is mostly a durable execution engine for arbitrary code in python/typescript on a fleet of managed workers, which is exactly what Windmill is. We are profitable and probably wouldn't if we were MIT licensed with no enterprise features.
From reading their documentation, the implementation is extremely similar, you define workflows as code ahead of time, and then the engine make sure to have them progress reliably on your fleet of workers (one of our customer has 600 workers deployed on edge environments). There are a few minor differences, we implement the workers as generic rust binary that pull the workflows, so you never have to redeploy them to test and deploy new workflows, whereas they have developed SDK for each languages to allow you to define your own deployable workers (which is more similar to Inngest/Temporal). Also we use polling and REST instead of gRPC for communications between workers and servers.
We’ve had a lot of pain with celery and Redis over the years and Hatchet seems to be a pretty compelling alternative. I’d want to see the codebase stabilize a bit before seriously considering it though. And frankly I don’t see a viable path to real commercialization for them so I’d only consider it if everything you needed really was MIT licensed.
Windmill is super interesting but I view it as the next evolution of something like Zapier. Having a large corpus of templates and integrations is the power of that type of product. I understand that under the hood it is a similar paradigm, but the market positioning is rightfully night and day. And I also do see a path to real commercialization of the Windmill product because of the above.